I use vim already for quite a while and every day try to learn new things. But, somehow I yet don't feel that I own it. I'm looking for some intermediate to advanced books on vim which may be used as a reference as well in every day development.

What I look for in the book is more explanations of concepts and general background philosophies than cheat sheet style lists of actions.

Maybe it could cover some commonly used plugins and plugin development as well.

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2

You are looking for a book about philosophies and concepts that do with a text editor?
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Oded♦Sep 14 '11 at 12:52

Well, not sure if I expressed it well and correctly but what I meant is more in the direction of explaining underlying approaches so I can understand instead of learning command by command as a dictionary.
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ivanjovanovicSep 14 '11 at 13:04

And you think there will be a whole book about that?
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Oded♦Sep 14 '11 at 13:05

That your question is about a very narrow and specific topic and it highly unlikely to have a book written about it. Writing a book takes a lot of effort, and for such a narrow topic, no one is likely to have written one.
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Oded♦Sep 14 '11 at 13:11

4 Answers
4

You might find that the documentation matches what you're looking for. Read as a book, you are steeped in the application and will grow to own it. This has become my personal solution to get to knowing the tools I use—mixed with experimentation and regular use of course. Frequently the concepts and background philosophies are integral to the documentation itself; failing that, a chat with the developers or reading archived conversations with them in the form of Usenet postings, bug reports, IRC logs, etc can help.

This often works for me with Unix/Linux (esp GNU) tools. This almost always fails for me with large scale commercial and enterprisy software (but there are often books…).

I already use the documentation, only sometimes it feels segmented in the way which is not that easy to connect the dots while navigating. There is the vim book on the documentation page as well which might serve the purpose.
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ivanjovanovicSep 16 '11 at 8:03

Vimcasts publishes free screencasts about Vim, the text editor. Vim
has been around in one form or another for over 20 years. The learning
curve is famously difficult, but those who manage to climb it insist
that nothing can match Vim's modal editing model for speed and
efficiency.

The patterns of use that make a Vim master productive are not easily
discovered. Trial and error will get you so far, but the best way to
learn is to watch an experienced Vim user at work. By providing short
videos with digestible advice, Vimcasts gives you something you can
take away and use immediately to improve your productivity. Vimcasts
aims to be the expert Vim colleague you never had.

As far as concepts go, there aren't too many of them in vim - buffers, registers, modes, commands, movements; that's about all there is in terms of core concepts.

If you want to know more about its philosophy, you might want to read up on the history of Unix and its editors, especially ed, ex, vi, and ultimately vim. Many of the design decisions in vim stem from the early days of Unix.

If you want to sharpen your skills, I suggest you just sniff around on vim.org - it's full of gems and general usefulness, including scripts and plugins.